


kaleidoscope heart

by virtueoso



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 16:23:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17511944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virtueoso/pseuds/virtueoso
Summary: Through twenty years of competition, Scott has seen his fair share of costumes. The funny thing is, he only ever remembers Tessa’s.





	kaleidoscope heart

**i. blue**

Tessa’s first skating dress isn’t even hers. 

The competition is a last-minute affair, everything thrown together at the eleventh hour when his aunt realises they have a half-decent Dutch Waltz ready to go, and a spare weekend where Tessa’s not in ballet classes and Scott isn’t hurtling round the rink with a hockey stick in hand.

His mother digs out one of Sheri’s old dresses from the trunk in the garage, and Tessa comes over one night after skating practice to try on the costume. It’s been a few decades, at least, since the thing has been worn; it’s three sizes too large anyway, but the years have stretched out the fabric. Tessa’s tiny frame is swamped by shiny blue cloth when she emerges out of the downstairs bathroom.

She doesn’t look pleased by the effect. Her mouth pulls down into a frown.

“I look stupid,” she mutters, her voice barely a whisper, her hands hanging limply by her sides.  “I want to take it off, Mom.”

Tessa’s mother pushes herself forwards from the sofa. “Don’t be silly, sweetheart. We’ll take it in at the waist and it’ll fit perfectly. The extra fabric can make you a ribbon for your hair. It’ll be beautiful.”

Silently, Tessa’s small fingers twist into the fabric of her skirt. There’s no shape to the dress at all; it looks like a baggy swimming costume, lumpy and unflattering. Scott thinks about saying something silly, something about how the reams of billowing blue make her look like a parachute about to catch the wind.

But instead, he nods his head encouragingly.

“It’s real nice, Tessa,” he says. “And anyway, Sheri won Nationals in that dress, you know? It’s got special good-luck magic on it. You won’t ever fall over if you wear it. _And_ you’ll get ice cream after you finish. The nice kind with sprinkles. _And_ you’ll never get the ice cream on your dress. It’s great.”

Tessa’s gaze latches onto his, curiosity peeking through despite her discomfort.

“It’s true, promise!” he says. “You can even ask Mom, she’ll tell you the same thing. That dress is the dress of champions. You’re gonna continue that tradition, Tess. You will.”

Tessa doesn’t look wholeheartedly convinced. She chews on her bottom lip, waiting for a second, as if she’s assimilating this new information. Then, she nods her head, her chin tilting back up.

“Alright, then,” she says, before she turns and heads back into the bathroom to change. “This dress is okay.”

Scott doesn’t tell her that it took three washes to return the fabric to somewhere near its original shade of pretty sky-blue.

He doesn’t think Tessa _or_ her mother would appreciate that very much.

 

**ii. pink**

For the first nine years of their partnership, Scott barely notices that Tessa gets older. It simply doesn’t occur to him that with every extra candle on his birthday cake, there’s one adding to hers too. She’s a fixture in his life, immovable, unchanging.

Nine years of aging catches up to him all at once the day of the Four Continents Championship Original Dance in 2006.

When Igor told them that the original dance for this season would be Latin, the thought had briefly passed through Scott’s mind that Latin costumes often required a certain degree of tasteful bare skin. Then, just as briefly, the thought had left him.

It’s unfortunate that the thought decides to rear its ugly and entirely-too-distracting head right when they’re supposed to be getting into the mental headspace for competition.

It is also unfortunate that Tessa has chosen this costume, of all costumes, to seek his help with wriggling into.

He knows why she’s having so much difficulty; there’s barely anything there to wriggle into in the first place. A bright pink sash skirt covers her hips and the tops of her thighs, with pink tassels dangling down to mid-thigh. The top half of her costume is little more than a glittery bra, pink fabric covering her left shoulder and arm. Two thin stripes of pink criss-cross her bare torso, but they’re a faint attempt at modesty.

When did she get _abs_ , for Christ’s sake? What sixteen year-old has the sheer audacity to have abs?!

Tessa makes an impatient sound, turning her head so she can glance over her shoulder. “Scott,” she says. “Hurry up, come on. We have to be out for practice in ten minutes.”

Scott looks down at the pink zipper in front of him like he’s studying a murder weapon. It’s only a secondary precaution; the costume is built to stay on even if the zipper breaks, but the bare skin of her back peeks between the edges of the fabric. If he trailed his finger down that gap, he could draw an unbroken line to the waistband of her skirt.

But that would be creepy. So he doesn’t.

He swallows, thickly. His mouth is far too dry. She’s pulled her curly brown hair up into a high ponytail; the end brushes the tops of his hands as he places them on her costume.

Carefully, he pinches the two pieces of the fabric together and draws the zipper up. It feels as though his breath hangs on the movement of the zip; with every inch upwards, he can exhale a little further, relaxing, safe, until-

Shit.

The zipper sticks.

He tugs it upwards, trying to be gentle – then back down and up again, with more force, when the soft approach doesn’t work.

No luck.

“It’s, uh – it’s stuck, Tess,” he mumbles.

“What? Did you break it?”

“No!”

Some more frantic zipper wiggling.

God, he hopes he hasn’t broken it.

“Scott, I don’t have a replacement. Please tell me you didn’t break it…”

She’s beginning to sound as panicked as he feels. They have a backup zipper somewhere, right? Marina would never let them go to a competition without backups, and backups for their backups. It’s why their luggage ends up taking half an hour to move from the taxi to the hotel – they haul around three copies of every single item they could ever possibly need for competition. 

“Hold on, Tessa. I’ve got this under control.”

Fighting the urge to drop everything and call his mother for support – the talk about “respecting sexual boundaries” that Suzanne made them sit through at age thirteen was better than this – Scott takes a breath, and draws the zipper back down to the bottom.

“Okay. Here we go,” he says.

In one sharp jerk, he yanks the zipper upwards as hard as he can.

And simultaneously –

“Ouch!”

_-sccrrrch._

“…fuck.”

They’re going to need more than a new zipper here.

 

**iii. white**

Tessa has this weird little tradition she foisted onto him at their first proper competition together (after they’d stopped blushing when they held hands, and she started telling him about the boys at dance class she had a crush on). He doesn’t know where she picked it up from – whether it was something her Mom told her to do or whether she simply came up with it herself – but he goes along anyway, because it makes Tessa happy, and he likes to make Tessa happy.

They’re not allowed to see each other in costume until the day of the competition.

She tells him it’s because it “preserves the moment” and it “keeps things special”, but he wonders if it isn’t just because she likes the way his jaw drops every time he sees her walk out of the changing room. It’s not his fault that she always looks _stunning_. And she always has that little smile on her face, too – the one where she looks up at him through those long eyelashes, and her eyes are so big and green that he feels like he’s falling into them, and her lips are pink and soft – not that he’d know, but he just _knows,_ you know? If he kissed them, he bets they’d be so soft…

Anyway.

Tessa has her traditions. Scott’s learned not to question them.

On the most important day of their lives thus far – the 22nd of February 2010, the day of the free dance at the Vancouver Olympics – she makes no exception.

He and Patrick are standing outside the men’s changing rooms before the practice groups are due to take to the ice, waiting for Tessa to join them. Patrick looks worse for wear, his eyes shadowed with dark circles; the prior evening’s celebrations post-men’s free skate had gone on into the early morning. Scott considers it a testament to their friendship that Patrick willingly dragged himself out of bed before nine a.m. to come and support them at practice.

“You’re gonna be fine man,” Patrick says, wincing as Scott thuds the toe of his skates against the wall of the corridor. “Take deep breaths.”

Obliging, Scott rolls his shoulders up and around, keeping the muscles loose and warm. “Gimme some gold medal magic, Chiddy,” he says. “A couple of hours and then you can have it back.”

“Yeah, right. I didn’t even have enough for my own skates, let alone yours. Anyway, you don’t need it. You and Tess will be great all by yourselves. You’ve got this.”

“Thanks, dude,” Scott sighs, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “It means a lot to have you here, you know… after everything, you didn’t have to waste your morning with me. I really appreciate it. Here’s hoping we’ll be celebrating with two sets of gold medals someday, eh? That’d be the dream, I…”

Abruptly, he realises that Patrick has stopped staring at him, and is instead staring at a point about ten centimetres to the left of his head. The look in his friend’s eyes is distant, glazed over.

His brow furrows. “Uh, hello?” he says, waving a hand in front of Patrick’s face. “Earth to Chiddy?”

It’s not Patrick who answers – it’s a woman’s voice, soft and familiar.

“Hi.”

Scott whirls around, almost tripping over the front of his skate guards in his haste to face the source of the noise. 

Tessa stands in front of him, dressed in her costume for the free dance, and words leave Scott utterly and completely.

There’s no describing it: ‘whiter than white’ hardly seems to do the dress justice, but that’s just it. Tessa is luminescent, so brilliantly beautiful that she seems almost to give off a light of her own. Tiny silver rhinestones shimmer across her bodice and, flaring out from the waist, a skirt of pure white flows like liquid down to her knees.  Every detail of the dress is immaculate; it hardly looks as though it was sewn, more like it was spun out of the night sky, moon-pale and scattered with handfuls of stardust.

In that moment, Scott is sure that he’s never seen anything more beautiful in his entire life.

“Holy shit,” he croaks, hoarsely – and her lips raise into a small, satisfied smile as she looks back at him.

From behind him, Chiddy’s voice is faint.

“What were you saying about gold medal magic?"

 

**iv. red**

-it’s not ‘red’” Tessa tells him, rolling her eyes. “It’s _burgundy._ You might learn something if you came along to more than one costume fitting, you know-”

 

**iv. burgundy**

He doesn’t see this dress. He feels it.

By the end of their four minutes on the ice in Pyeongchang, he thinks he would know it by touch alone. Stumbling through darkness, he would recognise the diamante beading digging into his palms, the whisper-thin rustle of the mesh along her arms - and above all, his hand at the bare skin of her back – the solid warmth of her body underneath.

Tessa can detail the kaleidoscope of her wardrobe in words as fancy as the costumes themselves.

Scott remembers in snatches of feeling, of a softness under his fingertips, or tension stringing the muscles hidden beneath the line of a dress.

This time, he remembers so much.

It’s that dress beneath his hands when he hugs her before the free dance, pressing her to him with such care. Every inch of her body moulds to every inch of his, and he knows they have an entire routine to perform, but it feels nice, for this brief moment, as they breathe together – in, out – to be not two beings, but just the one – undefinable and inseparable at every stage of their existence.

The free dance itself is a blur, all noise and colour and light, but there are certain moments of clarity – his hands closing around her wrists, fingers sliding slow and languid across the thin fabric, before they snap into their opening choreography. In their curve lift, she steps up onto his knees, arching backwards over him, and he remembers looking up and up and seeing nothing but her; only her, among the roar of the crowd and the surge of their music to the inevitable crescendo; only her.

His hands are full of it again afterwards, in the sheer elation of their success; he gathers her close in fistfuls of dress and skin and muscle and it occurs to him when her nose is pressed tight against the crook of his neck that he might be _hurting_ her – but she laughs, breathless, and he lets her down only to scoop her back up into his arms again, and he thinks that if he could, he would stay in this moment for the rest of his life.

This dress is his handprints on her back, the skin pink and flushed, and the funny twist in his stomach when he realises that he’s the one who left them there – and then when he tells her, dipping his head close to whisper it into her ear, the _look_ she gives him.

This dress is his thumb rubbing across her hip as they stand on the podium, her muscles still trembling with adrenaline, her body strung like a live wire, grounded only through him.

This dress is victory – twenty years of it, the big and the small, the ones that gained them medals and the ones that gained them far more. 

Because, he realises, he was wrong to think that he would never see anything more beautiful than Tessa Virtue in her dress of spun moonlight, with her dark hair spilling across her shoulder and her eyes alight with youth.

Better than that is the moment they slip away after the medals have been handed out, and the anthem has been played, and the crowds of family and friends have dispersed. They don’t say anything; they simply stand there, tucked behind a blackout curtain as the music introducing the next medal ceremony booms from the loudspeakers. Her hand tucks securely against his, slotting back into place as though it never left. She looks at him, and he looks at her, and that says everything they could ever need to know.

For Scott, beauty is not the dresses she wears, or the colour of the medals round their necks. It’s every day he spends with her.

**Author's Note:**

> A quick contribution to #takebackthetag, doubling as a way to shake off the rust after a week of laziness. Thanks to Lori for beta-ing!


End file.
